Investigation of FMEA Improvement to Present a New Framework for an Efficient Failure Risk Analysis of the Products, Considering Cost Matter

Increase in product reliability is essential to gaining customer satisfaction and is a crucial competitive advantage for successful sale of products. Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a common method to identify and analyze the probable causes of products failure and their effects. FMEA is used during the design stage of the products to improve product design and mitigate risk of failure. The cost of improvement of product design would be high if analysis of the risk of failure occurs on a previously manufactured product. In such cases, detective measures could be taken to prevent possible failure or at least to mitigate its effects. The process of reducing product failure risk is costly, whether by making changes in product design and manufacturing process or through developing detective actions. This research presents a framework for failure risk analysis which decreases the cost of reliability upgrades by improving FMEA using value engineering basics. An integrated model using FMEA and value engineering is presented to enhance the reliability of the product. The proposed approach develops a criterion for selecting kinds of actions for failure risk reduction besides cost mitigation to enhance the reliability of the product.